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Making Mentoring Work

By Margaret Steen on September 2, 2008

Mentoring programs can help new employees acclimate to your company or propel high-potential managers to the next level. But effective programs require careful planning as well as a good amount of time and resources to manage.

Here are tips from the experts on how to set up a mentoring program that will help your employees succeed:

1. Have a clear goal. Most companies are reactive rather than proactive about mentoring, said Lynn Sontag, president and CEO of Menttium Corp., a business which creates formal mentoring programs for companies. They may be trying to reduce turnover in a certain part of their organization or improve their diversity strategy, for example.

It’s important to treat mentoring as one of many tools for developing employees. And it’s critical to know what the program's goal is. If the goal is to reduce turnover, that’s relatively easy to measure. But how do you know if your supervisors are more effective after getting advice from mentors for a year? “What skill sets are they expecting those supervisors to have? What would success look like?” Sontag said.

And there may be times when a mentoring program is not the best way to meet your company's goal. “If they’re thinking mentoring is going to be the silver bullet that takes care of everything, then they’re probably not needing a mentoring program,” Sontag said.

2. Decide who will be mentored. You don’t need to choose participants early on, but you do need to know what kind of people you want to have mentored. “The goals of the program define the mentee pool, and the mentee pool defines the mentor pool,” Sontag said.

Is the target new employees? If so, what’s the definition of “new”: someone who has been with the company for six months to two years? If the plan is to provide mentors to frontline managers, how will mentees be chosen, or will everyone at that level get a mentor?

As tempting is it may be to simply offer mentors to everyone, it may not be practical. “It’s an admirable goal, but it’s very difficult to do,” Sontag said. “At some point you just don’t have enough mentors.”

3. Develop a pool of mentors. Once you know the type of people who will need mentors, you can identify potential mentors.

Sontag said mentors should generally be two levels above the mentees, so they can give their mentees a more strategic view of the organization while still understanding the mentees’ jobs. This also ensures that the mentor and mentee would not be vying for the same job.

Once you have a group of possible mentors, it’s important to assess the skills of the individuals in that group, said Michael Haberman, an HR consultant and vice president of Omega HR Solutions Inc. They need good communication skills — and the ability to keep conversations confidential. They also need to have a solid reputation within the company.

Most importantly, mentors have to want to take on this challenge. “There are some people who are very good at what they do that don’t particularly want to share it,” Haberman said. Others may be too busy to commit the necessary time.

Can a program be set up so some people — often in the middle of the company hierarchy — are both mentors to lower-level employees and mentees of top managers? It’s certainly possible, Sontag said, and it can actually help employees in both roles be better mentors.

4. Give the program a structure. Most formal mentoring programs last one year, Sontag said. Yours can be longer or shorter, but it should have an end.

One reason for a defined time period is that it’s easier to get people to sign up for a limited commitment. Also, you'll want to be able to have another group of mentees start the program, perhaps using some of the same mentors. Some mentors and mentees will continue their relationship on a less formal basis after the official end of the program.

Although each mentor-mentee team can determine exactly how often to meet, it’s helpful to give some guidelines. Monthly in-person meetings are common, but phone calls can work as well. More frequent meetings early on may help the relationship get off to a good start.

5. Prepare mentors, mentees and their managers. The program will work best if everyone understands its goals and the ground rules.

Make sure everyone knows how much time the program will take and who is responsible for setting the agenda for the conversations. Review what subjects mentors are prepared to discuss. If the program is focused on supervisory skills, then conversations may begin with a discussion of management techniques. But they can expand to include how to handle disagreements with colleagues, how to reduce stress and how your personal life can impact your career.

“If a relationship takes off and there’s that ‘click,’ I think the range of subject matter can be fairly broad,” Haberman said.

Finally, make sure the mentees' managers understand the program and give their workers adequate time to meet with their mentors. Some managers may be nervous about their staff members having confidential discussions with higher-ranking supervisors. “It’s not meant to replace the manager’s role in developing their employee,” Sontag said. “It’s just another tool.”

6. Follow up. Once the program has run its course, try to assess how well it worked. Since conversations between mentors and mentees are usually confidential, it may not always be easy to find out. But you can get general feedback from both mentors and mentees on whether the program was valuable and how it could be improved.

Don’t ignore another source of feedback: the managers of the employees who participated. “Hopefully what the manager will find at the end is that they have a more effective employee,” Sontag said.

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